The 2014 BFI London Film Festival - Second Despatch

Charlie's Country (Rolf de Heer)

Charlie's Country is the third film Rolf de Heer has made with Australia's indigenous community, and it might well be the director's finest picture to date. One thing is for certain; the film provides a wonderful, career-defining role for David Gulpilil, whose emotional investment in the story is absolute. Charlie is an ageing aboriginal man living in a ramshackle home in a small Australian town, which has been demarcated as an alcohol-free community. Charlie is a well-known figure in this region, enjoying some regular banter with the police officers, but the laws of the white authorities are gradually eroding Charlie's own way of life. When his gun is confiscated for the lack of a license, Charlie reaches breaking point and decides to retreat into the bush, where he can live by the ancient laws of his own people, free from the modern world. But adapting to this new way of life is easier said than done for a man of Charlie's advancing years.

This is a beautifully composed film – the landscape brilliantly captured by Ian Jones' breathtaking widescreen cinematography – that unfolds at a leisurely pace, but it has a real anger behind it too. Charlie's Country is a film about the marginalised indigenous people of Australia and the slow but steady eradication of an culture, but de Heer's approach is not didactic, he expresses it through the simple story of a man trying to cling on to what's his and find some sense of peace in a world that appears to have no place for him. David Gulpilil co-wrote Charlie's Country with de Heer after going through a particularly tumultuous period in his personal life, and it's obvious that much of what we see on screen is related to his own life experience. He gives a performance of that is both endearingly cheeky and heartbreakingly dignified, and de Heer gets the most out of his leading man by often just letting the camera rest on his face, allowing us to see the pain, sadness and anger in his eyes. A single medium shot of Gulpilil's face in particular constitutes one of the most powerful images I've seen at this festival.

Dear White People (Justin Simien)

During the closing credits of Dear White People we see recent photographs of white Americans who have chosen to dress up in blackface for parties. It's an instant riposte to anyone who might suggest that the blackface sequence in Justin Simien's film is too much, while reminding us that the best satire always exists at one remove from reality. And Dear White People is an excellent satire; a film that takes aim at multiple targets and scores a remarkably high number of direct hits. Set on the campus of the fictional Winchester University, the film follows a handful of characters as they negotiate issues of prejudice, class and racial identity, with the title being the name of a radio show presented by firebrand Samantha (Tessa Thompson). She uses her platform to highlight uncomfortable truths about black-white relations in what is, we are told, a "post-racial" society. One character describes Sam as being what would happen if "Spike Lee and Oprah had a really pissed-off baby", and Simien's film certainly bears comparison with punchy, provocative energy of Lee's early work.

Simien's script is clearly the work of an intelligent mind that has a lot to say, and it's to his credit that Dear White People never collapses into an issue movie in which characters become mouthpieces hurling opinions at each other. Each of the principle figures we follow in Dear White People – including high achiever Troy (Brandon P Bell), reality TV wannabe Coco (Teyonah Parris) and gay outsider Lionel (Tyler James Williams) – find themselves in conflict about who they are and where they are going, and Simien manages to raise points without sacrificing forward momentum. One of the smartest details in the film is the relationship between the university dean (Dennis Haysbert) and the president (Peter Syvertsen), which reflects a power dynamic that they are handing down to their sons ("Racism is over in America" the president says, "the only people thinking about it are...Mexicans, probably"). Simien is a stronger writer than director, and some of his stylistic choices can come off as a little too cute, but he deserves a lot of credit for creating such a sharp, hilarious and pointed film that has the right ideas and the right questions at, crucially, the right time. At one point in Dear White People, the black characters bemoan the fact that their cinematic offerings consist solely of Tyler Perry movies. Simien's film will help fill that void, but there is a lot to appreciate and ponder here for white audiences too.

Hard to Be a God (Aleksey German)

Great films immerse us in the world they depict, although sometimes it's a place you don't necessarily want to be. Hard to Be a God is set on a planet that resembles medieval earth, and I have never seen a film that depicts life in a pre-Renaissance age with such tactile immediacy.  The closest antecedent I can think of for Hard to Be a God is Frantisek Vlácil's Marketa Lazarová, which I found similarly mesmerising despite its being so disorienting and hard to follow. There is a narrative here somewhere. A lump of expository voiceover at the start introduces us to Aleksey German's adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's science-fiction novel, but the storytelling is so murky, and German is so content to meander through endless scenes of miserable-looking people having oblique conversations, I pretty much gave up trying to grasp events less an hour into the film's 170 minutes. Instead, I simply tried to take in as much of this extraordinary spectacle as possible.

Hard to Be a God was a long-held passion project for German. He shot the film between 2000 and 2006 and was in post-production for the next seven years, right up to his death at the start of 2013 (his wife and son are credited with helping finish the film). It's easy to see how a man can spend almost a fifth of his life on a film like this. The production is a staggering achievement – a 360-degree universe caked in mud, water and blood, and every single scene is alive with background activity and incident. It's a world so fully realised we can almost smell it, although thank God we can't, given how much of the film is rife with spitting, shitting, rotting food and corpses (both human and animal – it's hard to be a dog), madness, innards being spilled and the constant squelching of the soft ground underfoot (the sound design is incredible). Shooting in black-and-white, German and his cinematographers Vladimir Ilin and Yuriy Klimenko roam freely through their setting, capturing remarkable images that are sometimes grisly and sometimes comic (I'm not sure which category the giant donkey cock close-up falls into), and the camera itself often seems to be a character in the drama, with the actors turning towards it and addressing us directly.  These actors don't seem to be performers at all, but people who have lived in this world and who have breathed the fetid air. Hard to Be a God is confounding and exhausting, but essential. It is a singular, visionary work, and while I'd like a second viewing to try and make more sense of it – perhaps after reading the novel – I don't think I'll be ready for it for some time. It's hard to believe this film exists, and watching it is an experience that's hard to shake.

El Niño (Daniel Monzón)

There are a couple of shots in El Niño that are so Michael Mann-ish, they only had the effect of making me wish that I was watching a Michael Mann film instead. Perhaps that's a little unfair on Daniel Monzón's drug-smuggling thriller, which is an entirely competent and mostly engaging piece of work, but a little bit of directorial flair and imaginative storytelling could have elevated this beyond the merely generic. There are a couple of sequences where the film does get the pulse racing, with two stand-offs between a helicopter and a speedboat being exhilaratingly well-staged and edited, but a later car chase is laughably lacking in tension and is hobbled by a musical score that sounds like it was ripped from a 1990s straight-to-video thriller. For the most part, Monzón seems a lot less sure-footed than he did behind the camera on the more claustrophobic Cell 211.

At least he has Cell 211's star to call upon again. Luis Tosar is one of the great screen presences in modern movies, with his brooding intensity – not to mention those magnificent eyebrows – instantly commanding the viewers' attention when he's on screen. He plays a cop obsessed with cracking a smuggling organisation that's operating out of the straits of Gibraltar, and the film cuts between his investigation of both the drug movements and his own colleagues (suspecting a mole) and the adventures of the smugglers, three young men in well over their heads. El Niño is a pretty slick piece of work and I didn't resent the time spent watching it, but it started to drift from my memory the minute the credits started to roll as I've just seen too many films that cover this territory in a more accomplished fashion. The one thing that did keep nagging at me afterwards was the cameo from Ian McShane, who plays a character known only as "The Englishman" and who is clearly a key figure in the criminal organisation Tosar is determined to smash. As I watched McShane saunter around dressed like The Man from Del Monte and Tosar closely tracked him, I eagerly anticipated the climactic face-off (or eyebrow-off) between these two actors – but no! We are denied that pleasure, and it appears that McShane's entire involvement in this production consisted of strolling around Gibraltar for a few days, cashing his cheque, and going home. Nice work if you can get it.

Tokyo Tribe (Sion Sono)

It's probably safe to assume that Sion Sono will never make another film that I adore as much as Love Exposure, but I was happy to see him churning out his spectacular, bloody and often very funny films at such a consistent rate because they always offered some degree of entertainment. The guy is clearly a sensationally talented filmmaker, but Tokyo Tribe is an example of what can happen when everything goes wrong, when all of his worst excesses are indulged, and the resulting film felt much longer for me than the four-hour Love Exposure ever did. This is a hip-hop musical with a very large portion of the film consisting of characters rapping, but they all seem to do it to the same monotonous beat and the effect is like watching a Parappa the Rapper challenge being repeated ad nauseum for two hours. You've seen everything Tokyo Tribe has to offer within the first 15 minutes – in fact, the long tracking shot that opens it is the best in the film – and 90 minutes later the joke has worn very thin indeed.

I also found it pretty hard to sit through a film in which women are being threatened with rape or being stripped every few minutes. One of the first women we see on screen is a cop – dressed in a mini skirt and braless under a soaking wet shirt – who confronts a drug dealer and then finds her breasts being molested and teased with a knife for her trouble. Instead of showing fear, she begins moaning with pleasure, and this early scene sets the tone for the rest of the movie (that cop is never seen again). The whole film feels astonishingly puerile, with one principle female character having "the world's most pristine pussy" and a male character's prime motivation being penis envy, and at no point does Sono display a sense of wit or irony that allows him to pull off these attempts at humour. Tokyo Tribe is loud, chaotic, repetitive, juvenile and interminable, and while I said that Sono may never make another film that I adore as much as Love Exposure, I hope the inverse is true and that he never makes something that I hate watching as much as Tokyo Tribe.

The 2014 BFI London Film Festival - First Despatch

The 2014 BFI London Film Festival begins on Wednesday and I'll be providing regular updates from the festival throughout the next fortnight. Here's the first despatch, which includes a couple of the very best films in the programme.

'71 (Yann Demange)

With his blistering portrayal of a young offender in Starred Up, Jack O'Connell was one of the major discoveries at last year's London Film Festival, and his status as rising star is cemented by his performance in Yann Demange's remarkable thriller '71. He plays Private Gary Hook, a young British soldier sent to Belfast to help quell the unrest in the city, who finds himself stranded and on the run in enemy territory when his unit flees an angry mob and leaves him behind. The premise echoes Carol Reed's thriller Odd Man Out, but Demange – a TV director making an impressive film debut – has a much more visceral approach. He plunges us into the middle of this urban war zone and leaves us feeling as disoriented as the protagonist, who has to race through the backstreets dodging gunfire, and then must figure out how to navigate these unfamiliar surroundings to find his way back to the barracks, in a part of the city where everyone is a potential threat.

As a pure action movie, '71 is mostly executed to perfection. The film is a masterclass in tension-building and the recreation of 1970s Belfast as an urban warzone feels straikingly authentic (the sound design, particularly in the first half, is outstanding). The opening half-hour is astonishingly exciting, but the pace eventually slackens as screenwriter Gregory Burke expands his view beyond Hook's predicament to introduce secondary plots involving a great deal of double-dealing and shaky alliances between IRA generals and British special operatives. This element of the film is handled intelligently by Demange and the acting is strong across the board, but I couldn't help feeling that the increasingly convoluted nature of the plotting got in the way of '71's propulsive forward momentum. In fact, Demange's biggest weakness here is his tendency to stretch out the suspense in ways that feel increasingly artificial towards the end of the film, as the various players move into position. The film also opts for a couple of extraneous final scenes that extend the story beyond what feels like a perfect closing shot, and try to put a neat cap on a complicated situation. Still, the virtues '71 exhibits far outweigh its flaws, and as an exercise in dynamic action filmmaking there is little in recent British cinema to touch it.

10,000km (Carlos Marques-Marcet)

The title refers to the distance that develops between Alex (Natalia Tena) and Sergi (David Verdaguer), but when we first meet them they are enjoying a very intimate moment. After having sex, the two go through a familiar post-coital routine – washing, dressing, making breakfast and casually discussing their plans – and director Carlos Marques-Marcet simply observes them with his camera as the scene runs on in a single take that lasts for almost 20 minutes. There's a beautiful fluidity to the filmmaking in this sequence that is in stark contrast to the fragmented nature of the rest of the film. Towards the end of this opening scene, artist Alex receives an email offering her a year-long residency in Los Angeles, creating the first rupture in their relationship, and the rest of 10,000km explores the challenges these two characters face as they try to keep their relationship alive on separate continents.

The subsequent 70-odd minutes of 10,000km is divided into brief snapshots of Alex and Sergi's conversations over Skype, with title cards informing us of how many days have passed since their separation began. Our use of everyday technology is an increasing feature of contemporary films, but few directors have used it with such dramatic potency as Marques-Marcet does here. The initial enthusiasm the two characters try to maintain slowly slips into frustration, loneliness and disillusionment as the distance between them proves too difficult to bridge through a screen. Things this couple used to enjoy together suddenly become mired in awkwardness and confusion. Sergi trying to guide the hapless Alex through a dinner recipe is a highlight, as is an attempt at virtual sex on Skype, and one shot sees them lying in bed with their laptops on the pillow next to them, creating the illusion of togetherness. The pacing is perfectly judged and the performances from the only two actors we see on screen (both of whom are credited with contributing to the script) are charming, complex and emotionally true. Between them, Marques-Marcet, Tena and Verdaguer have created a remarkably intelligent and profound look at long-distance love in the modern age, and 10,000km resonates in a way that belies the minimal scale of its production.

Camp X-Ray (Peter Sattler)

As pleased as I am to see the brilliant Iranian actor Peyman Moaadi appearing in an American film, it's a shame that his route into such a picture is inevitably as a terrorist suspect in Guantanamo Bay. Nevetherless, his performance is by far the best thing about Camp X-Ray, a film that begins with a sense of purpose but then rapidly retreats from any sense of complexity or ambiguity. Kristen Stewart spends a lot of time staring at the floor and biting her lip in the role of Amy Cole, a young soldier sent to Gitmo who finds herself drawn to 'Detainee 471' or Ali (Moaadi) as she soon comes to know him. Any interaction between guard and detainee that doesn't conform to the Standard Operating Procedure is strictly forbidden, but Cole can't help responding to Ali's persuasive charm and obvious intelligence and a tentative bond is formed. Early scenes recall The Silence of the Lambs – even down to an unpleasant substance being thrown in the female lead's direction – with Cole being warned not to "let them get inside your head" and later telling Ali to "cut the Hannibal Lecter shit". We may initially wonder if Ali truly is a good guy or if he is simply a skilled manipulator, but that question falls by the wayside as first-time writer/director Peter Sattler soft-pedals the issues his story raises.

There are a few things to appreciate in Camp X-Ray. Some details jump out – such as the redacting of female pictures in the detainees' papers, or the use of "Alfred Hitchcock" as slang for the prison psychologist – but too much of the film is painted in broad, simplistic strokes. "It's not as black-and-white as they said it was" Cole muses at one point, but that's as much of a statement as the film seems willing to make. Sattler touches on the sexual harassment that Cole faces as one of the few women on the base but then goes no further with it, and returns to his central relationship which eventually strays into ridiculous territory (all Ali really wants is to read the final Harry Potter book!). The few potent moments that Sattler and his actors do manage to conjure have little impact in a film that's badly stretched at almost two hours, and the ending is frankly an insult. 

The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland)

The opening credits of Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy (complete with notices for "Dress & Lingerie" and "Perfume by...") seem to promise a pastiche of 1970s European erotic pictures such as those made by Jess Franco, Walerian Borowczyk or Tinto Brass. That notion stays with us when the film's premise is revealed – it concerns two women who are engaged in a series of sadomasochistic sexual fantasies behind the closed doors of an opulent house. But there is so much more to The Duke of Burgundy than this description implies, and while I was impressed by much of what this director accomplished in Katalin Varga and Berberian Sound Studio, nothing in his work to date prepared me for impact of The Duke of Burgundy. When we first meet Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna), she is the submissive maid for Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), but as we watch them go through with their repetitive rituals we gradually gain a greater understanding of the power dynamic in their relationship and how each woman actually views it.

In The Duke of Burgundy, Strickland creates a whole society of women (there's not a single male in the picture) that appears to be built around lepidoptery and sexual fetishes, and he uses this strange milieu to make one of the most perceptive examinations of a stagnating long-term relationship that I've seen on screen. Evelyn's insistence on being a submissive partner in the relationship is taking its toll on Cynthia, the older woman, who feels as trapped as one of the many pinned butterflies exhibited throughout the film and who yearns for a simpler life without painful corsets or lines to be memorised. As was the case with his Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy is gorgeously designed, with Strickland's production team and cinematographer Nicholas Knowland creating a rich, intoxicating, dreamlike atmosphere, but here it is weighted by a genuine emotional connection with the characters and by a playful sense of humour that teases out the absurdity of the situation without mocking it. The two lead actresses are perfectly attuned to each other and they keep the film grounded when Strickland's more outlandish ideas fail to take off, as they occasionally do, but even the dream sequences that fail to lead anywhere have a dazzling sensory impact. This is an extraordinary work; a sexy, absorbing, surprising and moving film that lingers in the memory, and marks a huge advancement for this talented, idiosyncratic director.

Queen and Country (John Boorman)

For what may well turn out to be his last film, John Boorman has returned to his own past. Queen and Country is a sequel to the director's unexpected 1987 hit Hope and Glory, his account of life as a child in London as the Blitz raged. Now that child has become a man, and Queen and Country re-introduces us to Bill (Callum Turner) just as the 18 year-old is about to start his National Service. Boorman's film unfolds as a loose collection of anecdotal scenes, but a couple of narrative threads emerge – notably Bill's infatuation with a mysterious and troubled blonde (Tamsin Egerton) and, more unusually, the theft of a clock belonging to their Sergeant Major (Brían F. O'Byrne). All of this takes place against the backdrop of the Korean War, which prompts a vivid nightmare for Bill at one point, and a sense of tonal consistency is certainly not one of the film's strong points as it flips from romance to drama to knockabout comedy.

That unevenness extends to the cast, all of whom seem to be attacking the material from a different angle. Figures of authority are played in a broad and stereotypical manner by actors like O'Byrne, Richard E. Grant and David Thewlis (who, startlingly, appears to be morphing into Brian Glover), while Caleb Landry Jones – as Bill's best friend – gives one of the most inexplicably mannered and misguided performances I've seen a film in years. Having said all of that, there is a great deal to like about Queen and Country. It's an extremely funny picture, with a number of very well played comic set-pieces and a scene-stealing turn from Pat Shortt as a man who has mastered the art of skiving, and there's the unmistakable ring of autobiographical truth about many of the vignettes Boorman includes – such as setting up a TV for the Queen's coronation, or the circumstances surrounding Bill's first cigarette. Boorman's direction is elegant and unfussy, and the whole film has an old-fashioned charm that I found pretty hard to resist (were it not for the swearing and nudity, it seems perfect for a Sunday afternoon TV slot). There are also a number of film references for cinephiles to enjoy – including a pointed discussion of Rashomon – and if this is to be Boorman's last feature, then he finds the perfect final shot to end his career on.

"Every film is a nightmare, and you have moments where it's wonderful and moments where you think it's a sinking ship." - An Interview with Pawel Pawlikowski

After the commercial and critical disappointment of his 2011 mystery The Woman in the Fifth, Pawel Pawlikowski responded by going back to basics. Shooting for the first time in his native Poland, the director made Ida, an 80-minute film about a young nun's voyage of discovery, filmed in black-and-white and in a square aspect ratio. Remarkably, this tiny film has grown into an enormous success, with the haunting beauty of its images and the simplicity of its storytelling resonating with almost everyone who experiences it. Ida is a remarkable artistic achievement and one of the year's best films, and I met Pawel Pawlikowski to discuss it.

Ida is a film that is deliberately out of step with current trends in contemporary cinema, and yet it has been a huge success so far. Why do you think this film has connected with audiences in such a big way?

It's hard to understand. Partly it's because it deals with universal themes, and it's strange listening to audiences in Korea, Colombia or Spain – especially countries with tortured recent histories – they connect with this sense of tragedy in the background and of trying to make sense of their lives. But I also think a lot of people crave the silence, the simplicity, the meditation or whatever the quality is that takes you out of modern culture, just for a moment. I remember seeing a poster for this film in Paris when it came out in February, and they chose a really good poster in Paris, the wide shot of the monastery with the nun walking in the snow, and it jumped out at you. All of the colours and movement, and suddenly you had this black-and-white space in the middle of it. I think it's just a throwback to another era.

There has been a lot of talk about how this film feels stylistically like a film from the '60s, but I also felt that it belonged in that era thematically. It was a period when filmmakers were exploring issues of faith in an artistically daring way, and that's something we don't see so much of anymore. Were you conscious of wanting to re-examine that territory?

I was much more naïve with this film. I just wanted to do it for myself. At the very beginning in the mists of time I had this idea of a Jewish nun, just because in Poland this is an interesting phenomenon, and I started to ask questions about what constitutes faith. Is it habits, rituals, social contexts, national traditions? Or is it something more spiritual and transcendental? And identity as well, you know, what makes a Pole? So it was a completely intuitive film in that respect. But on the other hand, when it came down to how I was going to do it, there was a motive to escape the noise and the information overload. It was just a case of being tired of cinema. I'm not talking about commercial films necessarily, but especially middlebrow films, you know, these good "quality" films are the worst. I was tired of all the trickery and devices of cinema – all those close-ups, tracking shots, helicopter shots, beautiful lighting, emoting – and one of the key phrases on the set was, "God, this feels too much like cinema." We said that if it was overlit or if the framings didn't feel accidental enough, or whatever. So it was an escapist film in a way, trying to escape my boredom of cinema. I mean there are some films I love, of course, but fewer and fewer.

So was the 4:3, black-and-white image part of your plan from the very start?

First the black-and-white, then the 4:3. The black-and-white was in my mind when I was writing, partly because it just felt right for that period, how people remember it and how I remember it, but then it became clear that it had much to do with the meditative nature of the film. Black-and-white takes us away from reality, which is in colour, and it just simplifies the world into black, white and grey. It's more conducive to a kind of timelessness.

It allows you to create so many vivid images that really imprint themselves onto your mind. I have seen pictures of Agata Trzebuchowska in colour and she's a very beautiful woman, but it's really extraordinary how she looks in black-and-white, the way it brings out her eyes and defines her features.

Yeah, exactly. It's a kind of abstraction from reality, which the film is as well. It's not trying to imitate the reality of that time or the films of that time, it's just a shorthand for the world.

What was your approach to framing your shots? One of the notable things in the film is how you frequently have your characters low in the frame or to the side, almost emphasising the background more than them.

It came as a result of choosing the 4:3, because when I was trying out the lenses I realised that while 4:3 is really good for portraits and certain shots it does limit you with the landscape. So it was just on spec, you know, I wondered how we could recreate the landscape, and so we tried tilting the camera up or to the side to give it some context. It gave us some interesting results and so we continued doing it, and then it was too late to stop doing it. Because we were making a film that was clearly not going to be commercial – although it has turned out to be commercial, strangely enough – and we would have such a limited audience, I just wanted to do it the way I wanted to do it and take risks. I guess it has a kind of vertical quality to it anyway because of the nature of the film, but I only intellectualised this choice much later and at the time it was just to try and make it more interesting.

This is such a minimalist film with characters who display very little overt emotion. When you are making something as reserved as this, is there a risk of holding back too much, or do you just have faith that what you're trying to express will come across for the viewer?

You just go with it. I made the decision to do it like that, and of course there were murmurings from the financiers – "Why can't they emote more? Why can't the camera move? This is going to be a disaster." The rushes didn't have a very good reception! [laughs] But I always assume that this film could be my last film, and I just didn't want to think that I hadn't done it the way I wanted to do it. I had a really good team around me too, they were very excited to be doing something that was so on the brink. I had a wonderful young DP [Lukasz Zal] who had never shot a film in his life, so he wasn't afraid of his reputation at all.

His work is incredible. I was amazed when I discovered how inexperienced he was. And he only came on board at the last minute when your regular cinematographer left?

Yes, he didn't like the direction the film was going in. Lukasz was the camera operator and had studied it and shot a documentary, so it wasn't like he didn't have a clue, but I did ring around all the other DPs that I knew first! [laughs] I called Robbie Ryan, the guy who shoots with Andrea Arnold. He asked me what the story was and I said it's about a nun, and he said, "What is it about nuns this year? I'm doing a film about nuns already," because he was working on Philomena. So basically I had no choice other than to go with the guy who was there, and he turned out to be great. Good energy, total courage and he was really excited, and that's all you need. Of course, you need talent as well, but when you go on this kind of journey you want people who will just go with you, with no ego problems and no fear. I also had a great Polish producer, who was a bit shell-shocked by my methods at first but then she said, "OK, he's writing the script with his camera," and she accepted it. She was really protective and I made a deal with her; wherever possible she will indulge me, but if she says it's impossible I will trust her and not push it, so we just developed this shorthand and moral code.

What was it like making a film in Poland for the first time after being away for so many years? Did it feel like going home, or was it like making a film in a foreign country?

Most crew members are similar, so it was like going home. And all of the figures in the film are drawn from people I've known – apart from Ida, who is a bit of a fantasy come true – and even the locations and the cars, it was a bit of a nostalgia trip. So in that respect it felt like coming home, and not just to Poland but to the '60s, which I had grown up in and identified with. And the crew was great, I mean, every film is a nightmare, and you have moments where it's wonderful and moments where you think it's a sinking ship, but because I'm older now I'm much calmer when these disasters happen. When the snow fell we couldn't shoot for weeks until the snow melted, but there are bigger problems in life.

So is the vision of '60s Poland that we see in the film largely drawn from your memory, or was there research involved in it too?

A lot of it is from my own point of view, but I also read a lot of novels that came out at the time, from writers like Hłasko and Andrzejewski, and the jazz music from that period I loved, and theatre and film. There was a kind of fearlessness about Polish culture at the time, a marginal freedom that emerged after Stalin and we grabbed it with such energy and imagination. I don't think Polish culture ever recaptured that spirit, and although I wasn't trying to imitate that culture I was trying to recapture that spirit, to make a film that was out there and wasn't looking over its shoulder.

The Poland we see in the film is a country that is trying to move forward but is still haunted by events of the recent past. Was that something you were conscious of?

No, because I thought it was just normal, and it was the only reality I knew. But looking back, yes, and I consciously chose that moment because the tectonic plates were shifting but it wasn't a dramatic turn like '56 or '68, which were clear turning points. They were much more dramatic and it would have been impossible to not deal with that drama, whereas here drama is sort of hidden. So that had a lot to do with it, but I also thought it was pretty cool and I wanted to project a cool image of Poland. It's funny, I read a review in Variety from someone who absolutely hated the film, and he said it was a really bleak Poland, but I thought I was making an advert for Poland! [laughs] We've got this great music, landscape, the sky, and people who are cunning, witty, sharp, but who have lived, you know. They're sculpted by history and have made decisions to do with their life and death. I found that plus the style to be really good territory. A lot of it came from the west, you know, these beatnik attitudes. They came from the west but it was the Polish version of it, which made it touching and cool.

All those guys wearing leather jackets had seen James Dean's movies.

Yeah, but James Dean was some bourgeois kid whereas these guys had to find the jacket on the black market, they had to avoid the army, they have to avoid the state. There was much more at stake so these attitudes were underpinned by some real existential problems and not the problems of middle-class suburbia.

You used the phrase "writing with the camera" earlier, but when you did sit down to write this film what was your process? You were working with Rebecca Lenkiewicz who isn't a screenwriter, I believe.

Yes, she's a playwright. I had actually written the story before and I wrote a different version that ended up winning an award at Cannes for the best script, strangely enough. Then I forgot all about it and went off and made another film, and when I returned to it I just stripped it all down and sat down with Rebecca to just start knocking things around. She wrote a bit, I wrote a bit, she wrote a bit more, etc. I find I can only really function when I'm not facing a blank page, it's like sitting in a psychiatrist's chair, so I like to work with someone just to get the whole thing to come out rather than being precious about the writing. The script was around 60 pages. It was partly good and partly things I could tell I'd have to change, but it was a document that we could raise the money on with a beginning and an end and some good things in the middle. But for the me the writing never stops and you are always taking the film to another level through casting, sculpting, photographing and rewriting, so I kept enriching it all the time. I was even rewriting it during the filming, and when we had a big break in filming because of the snow I rewrote the second part quite substantially. I didn't change the overall shape of what the film was doing, but I was just getting it into balance. For example, the stuff in the hotel originally was one night, but a lot of things happened in that one night and I felt it was too much so we added some scenes to spread these events over a few nights. I also felt the scenes between Lis and Anna were very clunky because I can't write love scenes, but when I had the two actors I found that less is more and a lot of what happens in those scenes wasn't written. So it wasn't exactly what you'd call a beautifully written script, but the only script that matters is the final one and how you get there is nobody's business. You know, in the west there is this kind of industrial approach to filmmaking; a producer buys a book, a dramatist is hired to write a script, a director is hired, the actors, the crew, and everyone just has their job to do. But the beauty of filmmaking is that it's a total work of art; literature, image-making, music, sound, psychology, it all intertwines in the most mysterious way and what you have at the end is the only thing that matters.

Would it have been a very different film if you had shot that Cannes prize-winning script?

I would never in my life have shot that script! [laughs] No, it was awful. Who gives these awards? It was some bureaucrats of culture, the European Media...something. I shouldn't criticise them because they did give us some cash for the production, but nobody knows how to read scripts, you know. People think that if everything is explained, if everything leads to something else, and if it's about an important subject, then it's a great script, but for me a script is simply a means to an end. When something is too explicit and you need explanatory dialogue or scenes that set things to get from A to B, then you're already losing and it's not going to be a great film. A film should emerge by a kind of divine grace, and when I feel that a script is telling me what I should feel then I'm out of it.

For example, the ending of the film is very ambiguous. We're never really sure what this whole experience has meant for Ida.

Yes, and that's how it should be. It's for the audience to work those things out.

You also move the camera in that final shot, which I think is the first time you do so in the film.

The shot before is a tracking shot from a truck but the last one is handheld and totally obeys her body movement. At the end she actually dictates what the camera does.

Your lead actress Agata Trzebuchowska has never acted before. Was it easy to convince her to take this role?

She was interested in meeting me because she had seen my films and she liked Last Resort and My Summer of Love, so she was just curious. When she could see that it wasn't anything like a studio film she slipped into it, although it was actually very scary because I felt she could have walked out at any moment, she really has no ambition to be an actress. But she's a lovely girl and very clever, sharp and principled as well. She's very curious about how film works and how the world works.

So this could be both the beginning and end of her film career?

Well, if some interesting director asked her for an interesting project then I don't know. I don't really know what her scale would be because her role in my film is not very versatile. The character grows but she's still made of the same material, unlike the role of Magda, which has many different facets and required a professional virtuoso actress. Agata is actually just doing her final exams this week in Warsaw where she's studying philosophy and history of art, so she's very aware of aesthetics and what they mean and she was interested in the process of filmmaking. I don't think she's an actress type, though, she doesn't enjoy being the centre of attention, and that's actually why I chose her, because she doesn't have a histrionic bone in her body and she doesn't need to perform to be alive.

Your film did remind me a little of Dreyer so perhaps she'll be like Maria Falconetti who never made another film after The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Really, she never did another one after that?

No, she went back to working in the theatre after that experience.

That's fantastic. I mean, never say never, if Sorrentino or someone like that called her then I'm sure she'd be interested, but I don't think she'll have a career. To have a career I think you need to be a theatre actress anyway.

The other Agata, Agata Kulesza, is a theatre actress. Is that where you first saw her?

I first saw her in a film but it was when I saw her in a play in a Warsaw theatre that I understood that she was brilliant, and when I met her I realised that she was also a great character. She's funny, sharp and strong. No ego, no fear. They're both very intelligent women but strong in different ways.

Finally, do you know what your next project will be? And do you intend to continue working in Poland or will you return to the UK?

Not entirely. I always have three things floating that are a bit half-baked. One is a story I wrote set in Poland again. One is about young Bach, as an angry young man when he want on this strange pilgrimage, but it's not really a historical film, it's more a meditation about life, the Devil, Bach and stuff. He was a troubled young man when he went on foot to visit his grandmaster of the organ, and it was a very interesting trip. And I've got another one set in England, on a boat on the Thames Estuary. They're all very different locations but dealing with universal themes.

It seems like the experience of making Ida has had a kind of liberating effect for you, and has reignited your passion for filmmaking. Is that a fair observation?

Yeah, I think so. It's never fun but there was a kind of calm about the whole exercise. You know, The Woman in the Fifth is a film I like a lot and is my most personal thing, but it was a very contorted experience, because it was a cultural and generic hybrid, and it looked like a commercial film but was always intended to be an avant-garde, incomprehensible experiment. It reflected where I was at the time in my head, and generally all my films, including my documentaries, act as markers for where I am. I'm not a professional filmmaker, it's just a little part of my life and it's not how I define myself. It's not really important whether I make the film in Poland, England or wherever, the films are always the result of where I am, what I've discovered and what's in my head.

The 2014 BFI London Film Festival

The London Festival is almost upon us again, and the announcement of the full programme this week means I have spent the last few days with my nose buried in the catalogue, marking films to look out for amid the 248 features that the festival contains this year. Below you'll find my own personal picks and I hope they'll be helpful to you, but before booking your tickets be sure to explore the furthest reaches of the LFF schedule because most of the real gems can be discovered far from the high-profile screenings and some may never been seen in UK cinemas again.

Galas

In some respects these films are the biggest films in the festival, with their profile and strategic positioning for awards exposure ensuring they'll grab most of the headlines, but they're not high on my list of priorities. I'll surely have plenty of opportunities to catch up with films like The Imitation Game, Mr Turner, Foxcatcher with their UK releases imminent (in the case of Men, Women & Children and Closing Night film Fury, just a few days after the festival ends). The films that did catch my eye here are the more unexpected Gala selections – the Chinese wuxia film The White Haired Witch of the Luna Kingdom (starring Fan Bingbing), the Danish Western The Salvation (starring Mads Mikkelsen, Evan Green and Eric Cantona!) and Peter Strickland's film of Björk's Biophilia Live (starring, um, Björk). The Archive Gala has reliably been one of the festival's most memorable events in recent years, and this year's restoration of The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands looks like it will be a remarkable experience with a live score performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall. Finally, two festival regulars return with Cannes prize-winners, the absurdly gifted and prolific Xavier Dolan presents Mommy, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan will bring his Palme d'Or champion Winter Sleep.

Official Competition

Peter Strickland's second film in the festival line-up is The Duke of Burgundy, for which the programme synopsis tantalisingly namedrops both Jess Franco and Bergman's Persona. There's a strong female focus in this collection of films. Céline Sciamma follows Water Lilies and Tomboy with another portrait of growing pains in Girlhood; Carol Morley's Agnès Godard-shot The Falling is set in a 1960s girls' school and provides a lead role for Game of Thrones' talented Maisie Williams; Daniel Barber (who impressively adapted Elmore Leonard's The Tonto Woman in 2008) tells the story of a woman trying to protect her land in The Keeping Room, and the 'Iranian vampire Western' A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night certainly sounds like something special. Other films I'm keen to see in this selection come from filmmakers whose work I've often loved in the past, such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The President) and Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan), while Abderrahmane Sissako will present Timbuktu in the festival and take part in a screen talk.

First Feature Competition

With a selection of films from first-time directors, it's often a case of pot luck and taking a chance on something in the hope of discovering an exciting new voice. I've already heard some promising reports on Yann Demange's Odd Man Out-ish thriller '71 and Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's dialogue-free The Tribe, a Ukrainian film told entirely through sign language and with no subtitles to help guide us. I'm keen to use this opportunity to check out some films from further afield, given the possibility that they may never make it to UK cinemas; films such as Zeresenay Mehari's Difret, Ester Martin Bergsmark's Something Must Break and Naji Abu Nowar's Theeb. But the British selections in this strand also look worthwhile, with Debbie Tucker Green's Second Coming and the Wolfe brothers' Catch Me Daddy piquing my interest, with the latter boasting cinematography from the always impressive Robbie Ryan.

Documentary Competition

The big news here is that one of the world's great documentarians Frederick Wiseman has made a film about one of my favourite places in London, and he will be presenting National Gallery at the festival as well as taking part in a masterclass. Both the film and event sound unmissable to me. Elsewhere in this section, I'm most intrigued by the presence of directors who I know better as fiction filmmakers. Ulrich Seidl returns to documentary with his new film In the Basement, a presumably cheery and uplifting exploration of the relationship between Austrian people and their basements; Winter's Bone director Debra Granik has made Stray Dog, a portrait of a biker she met while making that film, and In the Fog director Sergei Loznitsa's acclaimed Maidan observes a turbulent few months in Kiev. I'm also intrigued by two portraits of British artists in Hockney: A Life in Pictures and The Possibilities are Endless, which tells the story of Edwin Collins' 2005 stroke and takes its title from one of the few phrases he was able to say in the immediate aftermath of it. This year's Documentary Competition appears to be a very strong and eclectic field.

Love

A collection of films about various forms of love, and the first one that caught my eye is a film about a filmmaker whose work I love so much. Ron Mann's Altman is a documentary about the great Robert Altman, whose 1982 film Come Back to the Five & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean gets a 35mm presentation in the festival. Mathieu Amalric directs and stars in Georges Simenon adaptation The Blue Room, while Benoît Jacquot's 3 Hearts boasts a tremendous female cast. The films in this strand about people struggling to overcome both physical and mental ailments all sound like they might be worth seeing – notably Asaf Korman's Next to Her, Daniel Ribeiro's The Way He Looks, Shonali Bose's Margarita, With a Straw and Morgan Matthews' X+Y. I'm also very happy to see an all-too-rare leading role for Juliette Lewis, in Jen McGowan's Kelly & Cal, and fans of museums will be in heaven this year, with Johannes Holzhausen's The Great Museum going behind the scenes at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and perhaps making a perfect double-bill with Wiseman's National Gallery.

Debate

Following A Hijacking in 2012 and Captain Phillips last year, the LFF's now-regular look at modern piracy takes the form of Fishing Without Nets, a film by Cutter Hodierne that looks at the topic from the perspective of a Somali father left with few choices. This section contains a number of films that offer unique perspectives on aspects of society that we don't usually have the opportunity to explore, such as the Congolese fly-on-the-wall documentary National Diploma, the Indian documentary Court and Annalet Steenkamp's I, Afrikaner. Pedro Costa brings Horse Money, his follow-up to Colossal Youth, to the festival, while Hubert Sauper's We Come as Friends is the director's first film since his stunning 2004 documentary Darwin's Nightmare. Israeli-Palestinian tensions are examined through two films, Dancing Arabs and Self Made, while Rakhshan Banietemad's Tales looks at the problems facing people in contemporary Tehran.

Dare

This section of the festival houses the more challenging and provocative films in the programme, and some of the most challenging and provocative films of recent years have come from Greece, with a couple of them starring Angeliki Papoulia, so I'll be checking out Syllas Tzoumerkas' A Blast. The Ethiopian film Beti and Amare promises a lot of ambition on a very low budget, while Near Death Experience – the new film from LFF regulars Benoît Délepine and Gustave Kervern – intrigues with its casting of Michel Houellebecq in the lead role. A couple of filmmakers have two pictures at the festival, with Josephine Decker's second feature Thou Wast Mild & Lovely appearing here alongside her debut Butter on the Latch (in the First Feature Competition), while Susanne Bier's A Second Chance certainly sounds more interesting than the starrier Serena. I can't wait to see Abel Ferrara's biopic Pasolini and I'm looking forward to Bypass, the second feature from Duane Hopkins, who made a promising debut with Better Things in 2008. The logistic challenge of squeezing a Lav Diaz film into my schedule is one I'm anticipating, as his 338-minute From What is Before screens here, while new films from Eugène Green (La Sapienza), Gregg Araki (White Bird in a Blizzard) and Christophe Honoré (Metamorphoses) are on my radar too. But the most important aspect of the Dare strand for me is the opportunity to see two particular films on the big screen. I've resisted the urge to watch Aleksei German’s posthumously completed Hard to be a God on various online platforms in the hope of seeing it here, and Jean-Luc Godard's first foray into 3D gets a great showcase with Goodbye to Language screening on the very big IMAX screen.

Laugh

After all that, we'll need a chuckle, although finding laughs in this section can often be a challenge with the humour of one particular region not necessarily translating successfully to another. The best place to start is perhaps Australia, as the clip shown from Josh Lawson's sex comedy The Little Death was a highlight of the festival press launch, and Angus Sampson's The Mule has a promising gross-out premise and a starring role for Hugo Weaving. From America we've got two comedies that have certainly provoked plenty of discussion and positive word of mouth prior to their arrival on these shores, in the shape of Justin Simien's Dear White People and Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up, Philip, while the UK is represented by Simon Baker's Night Bus and John Boorman's Queen and Country, a belated (27 years!) sequel to Hope and Glory. Sophie Fillières' If You Don't, I Will catches the eye with its pairing of Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric, and there are new films from Bent Hamer, Hong Sang-soo and Bruno Dumont – wait a minute...Bruno Dumont? Yes, the director of L'humanité, Twentynine Palms, Hors Satan and other memorably laugh-free films reveals his lighter side in Li’l Quinquin, a made-for-TV comedy series that screens here as a single 200-minute knockabout romp. Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd write.

Thrill

A pretty exciting and wide-ranging set of films here, from Diao Yinan's Berlin prize-winner Black Coal, Thin Ice to Toa Fraser's Maori adventure The Dead Lands and Kornél Mundruczó's acclaimed canine horror White God. As a fan of Daniel Monzón's prison drama Cell 211 I've earmarked El Niño (starring the crazy eyebrows of Luis Tosar) as one to watch, and as a fan of Korean cinema I certainly like the sound of Kim Seong-Hun's A Hard Day. A few months after the World Cup, Eryk Rocha's Sunday Ball takes a look at football in the poorer regions of Brazil, and Zee Ntuli's Hard to Get offers an action-packed exploration of the Johannesburg underworld. There's also a sequel to the surprise 2010 hit Monsters, but I lost interested in Monsters: Dark Continent when it turned out that director Tom Green wasn't the Freddy Got Fingered guy. What a missed opportunity.

Cult

One of the clips shown during the LFF press launch that really made an impact was a genuinely spine-tingling snippet from It Follows, and that alone was enough to pique my interest in David Robert Mitchell's horror film. Sion Sono's Why Don't You Go Play in Hell? ended my 2013 LFF in a high note and he returns with his Yakuza hip-hop musical Tokyo Tribe, and Mark Hartley – director of the very enjoyable Not Quite Hollywood – explores the history of Cannon Films in his well-timed documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. The programme write-up for Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's Spring references both HP Lovecraft and Before Sunrise, which is certainly an intriguing combination, while tales of teenage loneliness are given a fantastical spin in Jonas Alexander Arnby's When Animals Dream and Jonas Govaerts' Cub. Finally, I'm glad we'll have the chance to see Ning Hao's Chinese Spaghetti Western homage No Man's Land, which was filmed in 2009 but has been battling with censors until now.

Journey

I'm generally no fan of portmanteau films but a couple of pictures here sound interesting. African Metropolis is an opportunity to discover filmmakers from a continent whose cinema I'm disappointingly uneducated in, and Robert Connolly has amassed an impressive roster of talent to take part in The Turning, 18 adaptations of short stories by Australian writer Tim Winton. Speaking of Australia, I'm a big fan of Rolf de Heer's work so I'll definitely be checking out his latest collaboration with David Gulpili Charlie's Country. Viggo Mortensen's wanderlust has seen him make some interesting and unconventional choices recently, and he appears twice in this strand, starring in Lisandro Alonso’s Juaja and David Oelhoffen's Far From Men, while Mark Cousins' travels always result in something interesting, so I'm certainly hoping to catch his new film 6 Desires: DH Lawrence and Sardinia. The Wonders is Alice Rohrwacher's follow-up to her fine debut Corpo Celeste, I like the sound of Suhra Arraf's black comedy Villa Touma, and Andrew Lancaster's The Lost Aviator certainly has an interesting story to tell.

Sonic

The main focus in this strand for me is Eden, the new film from Mia Hansen-Løve who I rate as one of the most exciting and talented young filmmakers working today. The best of the rest here are mostly documentaries, such as Michael Obert's Song From the Forest, Alan Hicks' Keep On Keepin' On and One9's Nas: Time is Illmatic. There's also a BUG special, which is always a lot of fun.

Family

While these films are aimed at a younger audience, the Japanese animation Giovanni's Island is one I'll want to catch as previous Japanese attempts to depict the war through animation have been stunning (although I suspect this won't be as viscerally shocking as Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen). Robot Overlords is a sci-fi adventure from the director of Grabbers, and the 100^th anniversary of Tove Jansson's birth will be marked with a screening of Moomins on the Riviera.

Experimenta

The films in this strand don't usually appeal to me but a few in this year's selection sound intriguing. The Film That Buys the Cinema – a movie made to raise funds for the Cube Cinema in Bristol – has an impressive list of contributors, and Meditations From Our Lady of the Angels offers an opportunity to see a wide range of films on 35mm and 16mm, including I Don't Know by Penelope Spheeris. There are also tributes to two recently departed filmmakers, Harun Farocki and Maria Klonaris.

Treasures

Here is where I make a heartfelt request to the organisers of the BFI London Film Festival – please give the Treasures strand its own section in the printed programme rather than dispersing its films among the various other strands. The archive programming in the festival is always fantastic and this strand – usually the strongest in the festival – deserves to stand alone. Highlights from this year include Powell & Pressburger's spectacular and sorely underrated other ballet movie The Tales of Hoffman, which has apparently been restored with unseen footage, and John Ford's My Darling Clementine, which again reminds me that a full retrospective of Ford's work is long overdue. Another picture restored to its former glory is Germany Pale Mother, a German film that has had 30 minutes reinserted and sounds absolutely fascinating, while the latest restoration from Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Foundation is The Colour of Pomegranates, a film I have wanted to see for some time. I was disappointed that The Goddess wasn't included in the BFI's Chinese season earlier this year so I'm delighted to see it showing up here – with a live musical score at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, no less! – and the other treat from that era is the Colleen Moore-starring Why Be Good? complete with Vitaphone soundtrack! I also want to make time for the Turkish film The Bride and King Hu's Dragon Inn, but one of the pleasures of this strand is the opportunity to take time out during a festival and wallow in the pleasure of re-connecting with a classic film you know and love. This year, a 4k restoration of Howard Hawks' glorious Only Angels Have Wings sounds like it will provide the perfect mid-festival tonic.

The 2014 BFI London Film Festival runs from October 8^th to 19^th. Check back here for my reviews throughout the festival.